To discourage afk'ing, rage quitting, and inactivity once players reach the top of the ladder rankings I plan to implement what I am calling penalty points. Penalty points will lower your Uniball Skill rating, thus lowering your ranking, but will not have any effect on your actual matchmaking rating so as not to arbitrarily change how the bot rates you vs other players. Messing with the math for matchmaking defeats the entire purpose of trying to make fair games.

Here is my proposal in its current form, let me know if you think the numbers need tweaking or if the idea itself is totally off from what we should do.

Not completing a game for whatever reason will "punish" you with 5 penalty points and a short ban (10 minutes is my current plan). I refer to this type of punishment as a "chicken", though many of us know it by the name "bad".

Being inactive on the ladder will give you 1 penalty point per day until you are no longer inactive. This will not start until you are inactive for 10 days on a given ladder type(solo or 3v3 currently). So on the 10th day of no games played, you will get 1 penalty point. On the 11th, an additional penalty point, etc...

Penalty points are subtracted from your "Uniball Skill" which is the number we use to determine your rank. Currently it represents a very conservative estimate of your skill level vs everyone else. The penalty would lower your rank temporarily until you have "worked off" the penalty points against you.

"Working off" penalty points is really simple -- play games! For each game you play, you will remove 1/3 of a penalty point. Win or Lose, as long as you complete a game your updated "Uniball Skill" after each game will change by both the amount it would normally plus 1/3 of a penalty point. Once you have reached 0 penalty points, your "Uniball Skill" will reflect your true ranking once again.

Working off a "chicken" will take 15 games, Working off inactivity penalties will take 3 games per day of inactivity (after the initial 10 days mind you). You don't have to wait the full number of days to recover from a penalty though, you will be lowering your penalty each and every time you queue and complete a game.

Penalties aren't meant to make it so players have no chance of getting to the top of the rankings, they are meant to deter behavior that takes the fun out of the game and also make it so the rankings reflect the skill of those still actively participating. Getting a single game in every 10 days in most instances shouldn't be too tough, and if it is -- you can always make it up pretty quick by playing a few games more later in the season. Getting an afk "chicken" one time won't end your chances of raising your rank, it'll just mean you need to be a bit more courtesy the next few times you queue up.

If I totally sucked at explaining my idea, let me know. So what do you all think?

Nick is adding some stuff that'll help with this. The game itself will report back to the bot when someone leaves the game and stays gone for 2 entire minutes. The bot will then look at who is still in the game, and figure out who to penalize. Most of this is already in the game, but what he plans to add is an in-game notification for when this happens so you know when its safe to leave the game and re-queue. Re-queue'ing while still in an active game will no longer be possible, I should have had the bot checking for this anyway and just never did. The afk'ing part is a bit trickier and would love input on a fair way to handle this. As a side note, this means you gotta stay in the game for the full two minutes or the bot is going to give you a chicken, penalty points, and a short ban.

First of all, I believe to most of us, the purpose of the ladder is not to be the best ranked, but to have the most fair competition and even teams.

I think for us to really know if the numbers would work well, we need to know how long a "season" will be or if there even will be seasons. If a season is one month then maybe 5 or 7 days would be more appropriate for the inactivity penalties versus 10 days.

I wish there was a way for the bot to know if someone rage quits or was just AFK (by voting?). If someone is AFK, then I think the point penalty is acceptable, but since, on a good day, we might have 14 to 18 active players at the most and 6 or 7 on a slow day, a 10 minute ban could affect the whole momentum of our games for the day causing people to give up trying to get a game going. Maybe 5 minutes would be better?